Most of us would agree that employees are company's most important asset. However, how do we ensure the people we hire are the best? The answer is though the talent's personality and your hiring operation.
Great people makes great business. This is especially true in service, creativity, research, and technology oriented business, where the reliability on automation is low and the requirement for skilled labor is high. People are your important asset. So what steps should you take to ensure you have the most talented people in your business?
When looking into talent management, we can break it down into two steps. One is how to attractive the best people to come work for you? How to get their foot in the door in the first place. Second, to retain the best performers at the company once they come and work for you.
To seek the best people to come work for you , you first need to know what you should for. What are the attributes of the best people on the market? Well, past performances like good GPAs and relevant work experience is a plus but there is more to it.
Hire the people that will act like a founder, hire people that will treat the business like their own.
People that view the business as their own will act and make decisions that are in the best interest of the company. In large corporations, the fight for limited resources are a common phenomenon. Take example, it is common for a bank to release newsletter on a regular basis, featuring the bank's products and promotions. It is in the best interest of each department to flight for the limited space on the newsletter. For instance the credit card department, the credit loan department, the mortgage loan department, the wealth managing department...all want to get their product onto the newsletter for exposure. However, will all of the products generate the same performance on the newsletter? Very unlikely. From an employee point of view, he will fight over the space regardless of its product past performance on the newsletter. However, if you hired a person that acts like a founder, he will more likely to take other department's products performance into consideration. He will be willing to give up some exposure opportunity to the product that outperformed his, for the good of the whole company and not just his department.
Hire only the best by taking your time, hiring only people who are better than you in some meaningful way, and not letting managers make hiring decisions for their own teams.
Comprising for anything less than excellence is the beginning of vicious cycle for your company. The impact of hiring people that do not match your culture for excellence. To hire people that are only somewhat a match for the role could be devastating in a negative way. These people will act like viruses in the company and spread the disease throughout the body. Many times, finding the perfect match for a role could be very difficult and very time consuming. However, you should never up. You should rather not hire then to hire someone that is not a fit to the company because the cost for bringing that person in is too great.
One more thing, make the hiring process a team decision, and not a manager's individual decision. By nature, we are individuals are biased, we have preference over certain things. This will lead us to be biased when looking for a new team member. Therefore, to have a few people form a hiring committee and to have each person contribute their opinion about the interviewee is important. Furthermore, try to introduce some form of quantitative measures into the evaluation the employee, don't make your evaluation based only on qualitative opinions.
When you spend the time to only hire the people that the hiring committee agrees is the best fit for the position. Later on in the job, even if this person did not perform to excellence, this person should at least have a decent performance. Why? because this person was selected out from the top tier.
If we think of the talent poor as a normal distribution, when you hire from the top tier, logically thinking even your worst performers at the company would still be better than 84.14% of the talent on the market. This will save you a lot of training and education cost in the long run. This will also ensure that your company do not bring in poor performing viruses that will ruin your company's culture for excellence.
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